It is not the nicotine.
08:32 Friday 5 Oct 07
Nicotine should be freely available in products which do not carry cigarettes’ health risks, to help smokers who find it impossible to quit BBC
Wrong. No. Bad move.
It’s not the nicotine. Nicotine addiction is not the problem.
Smoking a cigarette: Find pack, find lighter. Remove cigarette. Put pack away, Light it. Smoke it. Stub it out. Resume whatever you were doing. That’s not just “smoking”, it’s whole set of behaviours that become part of your life, they form a pattern, they become associated with other enviromental factors.
Example: I used to sit down to play console games. Cigarettes on one side of me, beer on the other. I haven’t drank for some 4 years, smoked for a little less and yet I still feel they should be there when I play a game. It was that strong early on I had to stop playing because of the association.
You have people at work who will congregate outside, maybe they go to escape the noise. They have to stop doing that.
If they smoke after eating then the pattern kicks in after that.
If they get stressed, have a beer, go pub they are more patterns.
If they see someone on the TV light up then they might too.
If they are lying or buying time or feeling uncomfortable then the ceremony of smoking is not there to help them.
It’s not quitting the nicotine that’s the issue. It’s the replacement of a wide range of behaviours that matters and it matters hugely. But no amount of patches will fix that because this part really does come down to the person seeing that as the obstacle and actively working though each situation.
There is also the fact that if you give patches away for free then they become of no value. If you are prepared to invest your own money in the solution then surely that is much better?
(If you want an example of a behaviour that is difficult to change – next time you have a shower/bath, wash yourself differently. Start with a different part of the body, change the order you wash around your body. Try and change the whole routine in some way. It’s not easy to do and yet still feel comfortable.)
1
Totally agree with you… I remember thinking that the actual nicotine craving was gone after a few days, the difficult bit was getting used to not smoking at times when you would normally light up automatically, like with a coffee mid morning or with a drink. My worst one was trying to not smoke just after I’d finished a meal.
I think it’s just a case of training yourself into a different routine. Which is really hard to do, and people assume that once the nicotine is out of their system it will be easy to give up. I think it takes weeks or months to give up smoking, not just days… but it’s POSSIBLE!! :)
11:52 Friday 5 Oct 07
2
(If you want an example of a behaviour that is difficult to change – next time you have a shower/bath, wash yourself differently. Start with a different part of the body, change the order you wash around your body. Try and change the whole routine in some way. It’s not easy to do and yet still feel comfortable.)
My friend and I were in a small group where for 7 days we did exactly what you suggest in the paragraph above. At the end of every shower/bath we wrote down how it went.
When our group met again we read the entries and found how patterned our behaviours actually were. Something else we uncovered was how easy it was to establish new patterns, while still grieving the loss of the patterns of the past.
It was a fascinating little test. I’m definitely hooked on shampooing my hair first and washing my feet last. Reversing the process was almost painful. :)
00:16 Saturday 6 Oct 07
3
Change my showering routine…..stop it you horrible man! :D
16:18 Saturday 6 Oct 07
4
I start at the top and work down. I am kinda methodical like that. :)
17:32 Saturday 6 Oct 07
5
I have to say, I smoked for eighteen years before being successful in quitting (so far)… but it was the nic craving that crushed me anytime I tried to quit before. When I did manage to quit — January 2006 — I used the 2mg NicPatch for six weeks so that all I’d have to concentrate on would be the smoking behaviours. I haven’t reached for a pack in awhile, but for the first five months or so I was reaching for a phantom pack.
The NicPatch system, according to The Box, was to use the 2mg patch for six weeks, then four weeks at 1.5mg then… a bunch of weeks, I guess, at 1mg. I remember it being somewhere around a four or five month system. But at the end of the six weeks I found I could deal with the behavioural stuff, so I went cold turkey on the nicotine at that point. I still, honestly, get cravings — this almost empty feeling in the back of my throat — when I think about smoking.
05:46 Sunday 7 Oct 07
6
Gabriel – I get those same fleeting cravings. And it’s always when the behavioral cues are right. It only lasts moments though.
I tried patches once. I can distinctly remember taking some clients out for a walk around the hospitall and on the way out of the unit I took out a patch and applied it. Because work had been busy I’d not had one on that day. Within minutes I had a headache, my head was also buzzing, I felt dizzy and I felt sick. That – unsurprisingly – put me off patches :)
08:56 Sunday 7 Oct 07